Large scale Engineering, Procurement, Construction (EPC) firms are required to design or model their plans before construction begins. When designing a new facility, engineers often find themselves re-engineering or redesigning components (e.g., digital objects, models, simulations, etc.) to represent physical, real-world components. The components are then used to construct a digital representation of the construction and to model operation or maintenance aspects of the construction. Re-engineering or redesigning occur because firms often lack a knowledge base storing firm wide know-how or often lack sufficient communication channels among engineers that are geographically distributed around the planet.
Others, mostly software vendors, have put forth effort to disseminate know-how in a more limited manner. Vendors prefer to lock-in customers into the vendor's proprietary environment by forcing reuse of data only from within the vendor's tools, thus limiting applicability of design objects across projects, across myriad design tools, or across a globally distributed firm. Moreover, they also fail to provide a holistic view of an assembly object, but rather merely a single tool perspective. Such an approach significantly limits reuse potential of a design object and limits collaboration with other third parties who use products from different software vendors. Such an approach can cause severe loss in efficiency or money on large capital projects where there can be literally hundreds of different third parties (e.g., design firms, construction firms, private contractors, sub-contracts, national or local government agencies, etc.) that must work together to achieve a completed construction project. A better approach would allow reuse of generic design objects via determining which contexts make the most sense for the design object.
Example efforts that have attempted to alleviate some of the above issued are described in the following patent literature.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,782,305 to Litepo et al. titled “Method of Geometric Information Sharing and Parametric Consistency Maintenance in a Collaborative Design Environment”, filed Oct. 1, 2001, describes exchanging files among different software applications where the files utilize a neutral format.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,693,900 to Wilmering et al. titled “Querying of Distributed Databases Using Neutral Ontology Model for Query Front End”, filed Jul. 4, 2007, discusses constructing a neutral ontology model for interfacing with multiple databases.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,814,429 to Buffet et al. titled “Computerized Collaborative Work”, filed Jun. 13, 2007, describes methods of allowing multiple workers to collaborate within a design tool. The design tool can display contextual information about objects within the design. Buffet provides for workers to share a design experience inside a tool, but fails to address sharing knowledge across design tools from one project to another.
U.S. patent application publication 2005/0159828 to Deininger et al. titled “Generic Framework for Porting Legacy Process Automation Assets to a New Control System”, filed Jul. 20, 2004, describes using a generic representation of objects to translate configuration information from an old system to a new system.
European patent application EP 1 325 165 to Gueli titled “Automatic System for Determining the Optimum Strategy for Controlling a Complex Industry System in Particular for Managing Water Supply Networks by Means of an Ecosystem Model”, filed Dec. 18, 2002, describes operating an industrial system based on a operative context. Although useful for operating a water supply network, Gueli lacks any insight into how one can leverage a context for design objects.
Further progress is described in U.S. patent application publication 2010/0241471 to Nylander et al. titled “Integration System Supporting Dimensions Modeling System” filed Mar. 19, 2009. Nylander contemplates propagating information among workflow applications used by a design project such as a construction design project. Still, Nylander fails to appreciate that a design object can carry past experiences of previous use or a sophisticated rules mechanism.
Unless the context dictates the contrary, all ranges set forth herein should be interpreted as being inclusive of their endpoints and open-ended ranges should be interpreted to include only commercially practical values. Similarly, all lists of values should be considered as inclusive of intermediate values unless the context indicates the contrary.
The known art fails to provide for adequate representation of a construction firm's know-how for an assembly (e.g., physical component, module, cable tray, processing unit, pipe run, etc.). What has yet to be appreciated is a quanta of engineering know-how can be represented by an assembly object carrying information about the know-how including rules for use, contexts for use, jurisdiction information (e.g., laws, standards, policies, etc.), or other broad aspects of engineering or design know-how.
Thus, there is still a need for intelligent library environments that store engineering and design know-how.